


At the End of the Maze

by Longpig



Category: Diablotin, Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Background stories, Crimes & Criminals, Diablotin - Freeform, F/F, Gen, House Rat, POV First Person, Partner Betrayal, Poverty, Prison, Reminiscing, rattes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-04-02 11:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4057876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Longpig/pseuds/Longpig
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hettie reminisces about how she ended up where she is now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At the End of the Maze

“You ever feel like you’ve got no… what’s the word they use? Agency. No agency in your own life story? Well, that’s kind of the way it’s been for me. Just getting pushed along by the current. Whatever was gonna happen would happen; whatever I tried to do to change that was just part of what would make it happen. You know?”

“I guess you probably think I was born poor Rat trash. Well, that ain’t so… We did alright, for a while anyway. Papa was a guard when he met Mam, real young. They got married when she got pregnant with Patric. Our papa was never an angel; he always drank real hard, but he kept it together, you know, functional like. So he had a steady job, respectable, and Mama stayed home with the baby. They moved to an okay place in Rhenea and waited to have more kids til they thought they were ready for reals. So that’s when I came along, 7 years later. And I guess Papa forgot how hard it was, or maybe I was just a shitty baby, ‘cause he started to wobble. Drinking before work and such. When Mam found out the hard way that nursing doesn’t really stop you getting knocked up… I think that’s when things really fell apart. Me, not even two, and then Thierry, a newborn, along with Patric clamouring for attention. Yeah, he couldn’t take it. He tried to run away from his responsibilities, straight to the bottom of a bottle, and it fucked us all. He fumbled a big Sheen bust, and it came out that he was drunk on the job. That was the end of the guard.”

“So of course then he started hittin’ it even harder. We lost the okay apartment and had to move to a slum on the edge of the Shambles. One of my earliest memories was watching the rats fight over trash in the alley outside our window… I’d name them and pretend they were my pets, heh.”

“Losing the old house shook Papa up a bit, and he pulled things together, for a while anyway. He got some private security gigs, bodyguarding, bouncing, that kind of thing. But sooner or later there’d be some little upset that would send him into another tailspin and he’d start drinking again, and get shitcanned. It was so fuckin’ predictable. I don’t know why Mam never just packed us up and left. Maybe she didn’t know where to go? Her folks lived in Ariège - maybe they still do, for all I know. I guess really, she still loved the idiot. Which is how we ended up with Serge-Yves, and then Georges and Alain. You’d think she’d have kept her legs shut!”

“By then, Papa was down to just doing odd jobs around the city. You could hardly recognize him from him and Mam’s wedding picture. Mam mended clothes for people in the neighbourhood, just to scrape a few sous together here and there. Patric wanted to leave school and get a job - he was fourteen then, I think - but she wouldn’t hear of it. Oh Patric, always so goddamn dutiful. Like a couple years later when he got some girl pregnant and left home to ‘do the right thing’ and make an honest woman of her. It was fine for him to get a job in some factory to support her, I guess. But at least there was one less hungry mouth under our roof…”

“It was rough as all, but we were alive. I used to help Mam with the sewing after school, and looking after the littles. She was our anchor, and I guess I tried to be hers. But then, well… One night we were sittin’ by the fire; she was hemming up some bloke’s trousers and I was sewing a button back on to Thierry’s shirt of something I guess, and she… she just sort of stopped; she looked up and said ‘oh,’ just like that, and she fell over, with a little bit of blood running down her nose. The man with the pants, bless him, he tried to find a healer but it weren’t no good. She was just gone. The priest said there was something in her head that wasn’t made quite like it should’ve been, and it kind of let go. She’d been having headaches, but she just brushed it off, you know? So that was it.”

“And then what? Well, about what you’d expect. We didn’t have the money for any kind of fancy service; she’s buried in the paupers’ yard. Patric bought her a little stone, with just her name on it. That was it… Papa shut down, shut off, crawled into a winesink somewhere. We were on our own. Without Mam’s sewing there was no way to feed everyone, or even buy firewood. So that’s when I left school, and there was no one to tell me different. I picked up her sewing needles, but with Papa out wandering that wasn’t enough. I mean, he did come back eventually, but I knew he was not gonna be any kind of reliable. So when no one was wantin’ anything hemmed or patched, I went out on the street. I was… eleven maybe? No one was throwing me any birthday parties, so it’s hard to keep track, heh. I’d panhandle a little, but I never got the big-eyed orphan thing down well enough to make much with that. I looked for coins folk had dropped, scrounged in alleys behind restaurants, just like my old pets. And if someone happened to set their purse down while they stopped at a food cart or a newspaper stand, maybe they didn’t find it again. I made sure the boys stayed in school though, like Mam would have wanted. That’s how it was, for a good while. And with that, and whatever work Papa did manage to stumble through, we were alive.”

“Then one day, this kid from down the way comes up to me as I’m leaving our place. Jeannot Bottin. He was a friend I guess; we grew up together, ran around in the streets getting in folk’s way, played ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’... His didn’t do too much for me though, I gotta say! Not my taste, as it turned out… although I suppose there was that one fellow at the theatre I wouldn’t have minded tastin’. Haha, don’t look so scandalized. You know who I mean.”

“Where was I? Right, Jeannot. So he comes up to me and he says, ‘I seen you crawling in the bins out back of Le Pied d’Cochon. I know a better way.’ He tells me about how he and a couple other kids’d been going down into the sewer, gaffin’. And I’m thinking, you know, that doesn’t sound better; but he swears they find good stuff, like you wouldn’t believe what gets washed down there. Maybe even bits from the old undercity… Then you take the stuff home, polish it up and hawk it. Easier work than begging and scrounging, more money, and all you need’s a stick with a hook on the end. So I figured why not. I’m a rat, after all, and I ain’t too good for the sewers.”

“Well I don’t know that it was easier, but it worked out better for me anyhow. I was good at it. I could see better in the dark than most, and I’m small enough I could get in places the bigger kids couldn’t, reach places they couldn’t get their hands in. It wasn’t reliable work - sometimes I’d find like, a ring or something and we’d eat for a couple weeks off that; but then there’d be a lean few. Still, we were better off ‘n we were before.”

“So I guess it was a couple years into that, give or take, that I met Annyck. Yeah, that one. The one I don’t like to talk about. She was real special. How can they hurt you if they ain’t? I met her running down below. She used to cut purse straps in Rhenea, near the Castalia, and dodge the guards by ducking into the tunnels. No guard’s willing to slog through the sewers for a pickpocket, lemme tell you! So we ran into each other a few times, started hanging out just friendly-like, but it weren’t long before it was more than that. By then I’d messed around with a few girls, but she was the first one that felt like… the real thing, you know? She was beautiful, with big brown eyes, and this red hair that was just like… like a firework went off or somethin’. She was old blood rat, she could even change if she tried real hard. You didn’t know we could still do that? Heh. Well, she’s the only one I ever knew. She tried to teach me but I never could get more ‘n a whisker.”

“We started spendin’ more and more time together - we were, what did you say before? Inseparable. When Patric found out, he didn’t like that much. He thought she was no good, a bad influence. Hah. I told him where he could shove it; he lost any right to tell me what to do with my life when he walked out. So that shut him up but quick, and he went back to his real family.”

“So how it all really started was one day we got to talking about our, you know, profession as it were. Both of us workin’ so hard just to keep food in our mouths, and with nothin’ else to show for it. I was still livin’ with the whole family, and she was in a squat down by the river. We wanted more… Like some clothes without patches, shoes what no-one wore before, maybe a place of our own. But more ‘n that even - respect, a reputation… a legacy, like.”

“I had a pretty good idea she wasn’t talkin’ about opening a restaurant or such. Still, when she showed me the gun she’d lifted a couple weeks later, well, I wasn’t ready for it. But it was exciting. So I ask her what, are we going to stick people up? And she says no, not people - criminals. So then it’s not really like a crime at all, see? And the guards won’t be gettin’ in the way. So maybe I was ridin’ a high off that shiny new gun, or just the way it looked in my lover’s hand, but I was in. Just, fuck it, let’s do it.”

“We started with the Sheen dealers; that was my idea. Y’know, it was almost funny how much they weren’t expecting it. Some of ‘em would be armed but, oh, the look on their faces when Nycki would come up behind ‘em and stick that muzzle against their neck… priceless. Well, you’ll just have to take my word for it. From there - after we got better, equipped, y’know - we moved on to the drug houses. Then we could take the customers on top of the dealers. We were damn good; it went real smooth. Started getting a rep… We’d cover our faces, but even so. They had some real creative-like names for us, you can imagine. My favourite was ‘Queen Quiffs,’ or maybe ‘Thunder Cunts’ - ‘cause Annyck had this real loud gun, see? Pretty sure she knocked the ears right off some of them hoods.”

“So we got the place we wanted, and enough besides to look after the boys. Papa knew the jack weren’t comin’ from no factory work, but he never said nothin’. Patric just looked down his nose from across the city. We didn’t talk much in them days. Or, y’know, now. Heh. Anyway, I made sure to put some away in a little stash just in case somethin’ happened to me. I’m no dummy, I knew this weren’t maybe the most sustainable thing. I told Thierry where to find it if’n he needed to. He was a responsible kid - like if Pat were less of a wet blanket.”

“When did it fall apart? Why? Well, it weren’t no more than dumb bad luck. I guess it was in ‘72; we’d been runnin’ our game a few good years. We roll up on this house; we’d been casin’ it a couple weeks to figure the best time to hit it when there’d be plenty o’ junkies and not too many staff, right? So we kick in the door, throw down, wave our pieces around, get what we came for. No one did anythin’ stupid and it went like clockwork. But when we busted out - guards, fuckin’ guards fuckin’ everywhere. We had our guns out but they got the drop on us but good. We were pinched and we knew it. They were mighty pissed off - none too gentlemanly about clappin’ those irons on, lemme tell ya. Shoved my face right in the dirt, and then the fat one bloody sat on me! But Annyck… when they tried to clip those bracelets on her, she dropped everything. I mean everything - her gun, the swag, her clothes - and she was gone. Even before I saw her scurry off I knew what she’d done. An’ I didn’t blame her y’know? Not a bit. I loved her, an’ I wanted her to be free. Some suit who was with the cops - brighter than the rest I guess - he went after her but he weren’t never gonna find another rat in the Shambles.”

“So that was it - the Creux for me. I think that was the first time I was ever really scared of somethin’ - walkin into that big dark pit of a place, with all those girls shriekin’ and screamin’ at me. You can’t let on though, ‘cause then you’re dead for sure, and I was already gonna have enough problems - word had spread who I was, and the atmosphere weren’t none too friendly.”

“Prison is - it’s the worst place, the worst you can imagine. It’s hard to understand if you ain’t been. I’m shoved in a damp stinkin’ cage with seven other girls, with a lousy mildewed mat to sleep on, nothin’ but wormy garbage t’ eat, and a bucket for a john. One of them girls shouldn’t even’ve been there - pretty sure she had somethin’ wrong upstairs, if you feel me. And maybe the six others didn’t all wanna see me dead, but they sure as all weren’t gonna try ‘n stop anyone else. I knew it was comin’; someone would come after me and I would have to show that I was harder, not to be fucked with, see? So when it was dark I worked on loosenin’ one of my bedsprings. I slept with me eyes open, and I waited.”

“It weren’t long - maybe a couple weeks, before someone tried their luck. It was in the showers - which were none too fuckin’ frequent, by the by. There was some little scuffle just outside and the screws were distracted; this bird pulls a little shiv out of her hair and takes a run at me… but I’m fast and I’m right slippery; I get my little spring out from… well, you guess where, heh, and before she knew what was what, I had it stuck right through her neck, blood all coming out her mouth. That was the first time - well, I’d shot bodies before, but that was the first time it was up close, that I’d seen the eyes go dead right in front of me face. Yeah, I know you don’t like hearin’ about this kind of stuff, but you asked. Anyway, by the time the screws came back she was bleedin’ out on the floor, and ain’t no one was gonna say what happened. That’s the way it is in prison - there’s a code, and even if you hate someone you ain’t gonna rat them out.”

“After that, folk mostly left me alone. So I just tried to, you know, get on with my time, and not lose my marbles. It’s harder ‘n it sounds. It’s so gods damned lonely in there, even surrounded by people. You got no one to talk to, no one to trust. It does things to your mind. I did get letters from my brothers, once in a blue moon, when the guards remembered to give ‘em to me. Mostly from Thierry, but there was one real choice one from Patric early on, about how real disappointed everyone was. Hah. Maybe he was disappointed, but Thierry was goin’ to a trade school and everybody had a full stomach.”

“Well a few years rolled on by and I kept my head down. So when they decided the Creux was so overfull it was set to burst, I was on the list for good behaviour. I was back out on the street, and to level with ya I had no actual fuckin’ clue what to do with myself. Thierry had got a job at a plant, and his own place, and Serge-Yves had signed on with a merchant ship. He’d always loved readin’ about life on the sea… Georges and Alain begged Thierry to let them stay with him, and no wonder - I tried livin’ back at home with Papa but it was just too godsdamned much. I lasted about two weeks ‘fore I was about ready to slit my wrists. He was worse than ever. I couldn’t help him, and I couldn’t watch. So I left. Had no dough - that’d run dry, but at least Thierry could look after the boys until they could finish their schoolin’ and get work. So I was livin’ under a bridge with some other low-lifes, tryin’ to weigh up my desire to y’know, not be in prison ever again, ‘gainst my need to eat food. I didn’t have many, what you’d call, transferrable skills; and plenty o’ places won’t even let you get a foot in the door once they get wind you’ve been livin’ under the Emperor’s roof.”

“So how’d I wind up with you lot at the theatre? Another bit o’ dumb luck. I was leavin’ Thierry’s place and who do I run into but Jeannot fuckin’ de Coubertin. From the old days. All grown up and cleaned up and such. We got to talkin’ and he bought me a cup of joe… Well it were pretty obvious I wasn’t doin’ too great, but he wasn’t an ass about it, just asked if I was lookin’ for work. Turned out his wife’s aunt was head of wardrobe at this playhouse, and they’re lookin’ for help. Said he could probably get me an interview if I wanted - he remembered how me ‘n’ Mam used to do the mendin’ for folk in the neighbourhood. So yes, I did want. I scraped up every last little copper I could to rent a room in one of those flophouses that rents ‘em by the hour, just so’s I could wash up, and off I went. Had nothin’ to lose, so I just leveled with the old bird - Feydeau, you remember? I knew I could do the job, and weren’t nobody gonna want it more ‘n’ I did. I guess it impressed her - either that or she figured she could pay me less than a body with no rap sheet!”

“Well at first, my only ambition was to go to bed with a full stomach, and with a roof over me head. But then… I dunno. The sewin’, it reminded me of Mam. Like, things weren’t roses back then, but there were some good times; we were all together, an’ even if Patric was an ass, we were a family. So I had that feel to go on. It was motivatin’, you know? And I was good at it, the work. I started thinkin’ like maybe I could get somewhere. And then there were you folk. I’d never… aw, don’t want to get all mushy here, but I’d never had friends like that, who just took me for what I was, without judgin’ or what have you. Well, except for Annyck. So those were good times. The best. We did some amazin’ things… Remember that dress? You rigged it up to change colour on stage somehow; I still don’t really understand all that science stuff, but it were real swell. And I really thought that it could last, you know? But then everything got balled up. Yeah, that thing with the old bird’s ring. They said that I was the only one in ‘n’ around her dressing room in the time it went missin’, and that’s so - I was linin’ up her costume changes for the next show - but I never took nothin’. I know you believed me, and I guess Lealia and Obern, but the rest… Well once it came out about my, ah, previous address, that was it. They couldn’t rightly prove nothin’, but they let me go anyhow. Y’know, I’m still convinced she didn’t just leave the damn thing at home and then forget about it. Probably turned up a week later ‘n’ she was too embarrassed to say.”

“So that were it. It weren’t long before the money ran out and I was lookin’ at the streets again. Now I know you were real … disappointed things went the way they did, and you’re gonna say that I should’ve asked someone for help - you’ve said it before! But let me tell you, I was so angry with what happened… Maybe I weren’t thinkin’ all the way straight. And maybe I weren’t used to bein’ able to ask.”

 

“Well that’s where I was, lost, desperate, angry… when she strolls back into my life. Yeah, Nycki. Fresh back from Quevallon, or so she said. She’d run there to hide from the heat, made some new friends, contacts. She was doin’ alright - she looked amazin’, the cat’s meow. And she was just like always, same old Nycki. That smile, her laugh, her wicked sense of humour… I was goofy for her all over again, an’ I hung onto her like a life preserver. I moved into her hotel room, and we just picked up where we left off, ya know? Well, not quite exactly where - there weren’t no stickups this go ‘round. She told me that she’d come back to Diablotin for a job. One of her new friends in Quevallon wanted her to get this orchid from some swanky digs in [neighbourhood].Her cut was s’posed to be enough that she - that we wouldn’t never have to pull another caper. Well that sounded just ducky to me. It was s’posed to be easy money, way less risk than what we’d been doin’ before. Creep on into some ritzy house, break into the safe and make off with the goods, live happily ever after on the beach in Quevallon. Easy peasy.”

“We spent the next coupla weeks casin’ the joint. Knew more about those folk’s lives than they did, I reckon. So we figured a time when the help was gonna be off for the night, and they were gonna be out at the opera or somethin’.Well, we creep up on the place, unlocked the back window to the study, where the safe was. There was a little booby-trap of some kind on it, but Nycki took care o’ that, and then we cracked open the box. Inside there was a bunch of jewelry, some papers, cash… I didn’t know what the specific thing was we were meant to nick, so I just scooped it all into the bag, and we were out. Just like she said.”

“Well we didn’t get far before she started actin’ funny, nervous like. She thought someone might have seen us come out, someone was followin’ us. So she says we oughta split up: I take the swag and stash it somewhere, and we’ll meet up back at the hotel once we’re sure we’ve shaken the tail, right? Well I didn’t see no-one but I figured better safe than sorry. Maybe I shoulda twigged then that somethin’ was up, but y’know, the adrenalin was goin’, and to be honest, it just never even entered my mind that she would double-cross me. So I split off, wandered around so’s I was good and sure there was nobody t’see me, and went underground. I knew a place - Annyck’s gran had showed her when she were little, an’ she showed me how to get there - a way to get in to the old city. I took some loose bricks out of a wall, hid the bag and put the stones back. Then I headed home.”

“When I got back to the hotel, when I stepped in the room… It was then I knew somethin’ weren’t right. It didn’t smell like her. I still had me hand on the knob; I was ready to bolt, but it was too late. The guards came out of the bathroom, and from across the hall behind me. I knew I’d been duped. Well I was angrier then than I’d ever been in my life, and I fought like hell, but it weren’t no good. There were too many of ‘em; they’d been waitin’ for me, and they were better trained than guard usually are. So I’m hauled off to the Creux again. I was spittin’ nails and tryin’ not to cry, all at once. It was far ‘n’ away the worst time. I just… I still don’t understand why, you know? Why. What’d I done to deserve that. Well, I had a lot of time to think on it and I still ain’t got an answer.”

“The second go weren’t any more fun than the first, but at least no one tried to shiv me. The Empire were gearin’ up for war of course, so they had us workin’ on that. I was sewin’ uniforms. At first it were like a real slap in the face, y’know? Just rubbin’ in the life I could’ve had, and then screwed up. But I decided to just put my head down ‘n’ do it, try to forget what it were for. They had us using those new machines, so I learned somethin’, too. And I had letters from you n’ Thierry or the boys, sometimes even a postcard from Serge-Yves. So yeah, I was doin’ better than a lot of the girls in there.”

“The worst was when Patric came t’see me. They don’t let you have visitors, right, so when you get one you know it ain’t gonna be good. And yeah, he’d come to tell me that Georges was - that he’d been gunned down in Psyra. I mean, I guess I appreciate that he would come, but GOds did I wish it could have been anyone else. Thierry was lookin’ after Alain though; he was real broken up, like you’d expect. I just felt like the lowest of the low, scum of the earth, that I couldn’t be there for them. And I could tell he was thinkin’ just that. But y’know, fuck him. I’d always taken care of mine as best I knew how… and I’d had it off a cellie that one of his girls was runnin’ with the gangs now, so how’s that for irony?”

“After they took me back to the cells though, I got to thinkin’ some. I decided then that I was done bein’ jerked around by fate.I’d spent too long just kinda… fallin’ into things, fallin’ in with folk - just takin’ what came to me and tryin’ to hold on as best I could until someone came along to take it away again. I made up my mind that if’n I ever got out, I was gonna take control of my fuckin’ life and make somethin of it he couldn’t look down on no more.”

“Well it weren’t long after that, funny enough, that word came down they were gonna let me out again. I’d been a good girl, and there were too many miscreant janes comin’ up through the system… So that’s when I came to see you. Yeah, I know you were real surprised, but there weren’t no time to write ahead! Askin’ for your help were one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Like I said… it ain’t something that comes natural to me.I really appreciate all you done… If it weren’t for you, I’d never have got that job at Tits’ - lemme tell you, after I dropped your name they were a lot more interested in my application, heh. But I’m gettin’ ahead of myself, and skippin’ the good bit.”

“I know you been wonderin’ how I got myself set up so quick after I left your place - I’m sure you had an idea; you’re a smart girl! So. I’d left it as long as I could, y’know, just in case the guard were keepin’ tabs on me post-release, but I couldn’t stand it no more and I had to know, y’know, if it was still there. I didn’t imagine it would be. It would’ve been the first place she’d look. But when I got down there the dust was so thick I didn’t think anyone had been… probably since I’d been in the Creux. And when I pulled out those bricks, there it fuckin’ was. Everything was still there, everything but them papers. And there was somethin’ else: Annyck’s gun. Yeah, from the old days. I knew - I mean, I know she meant for me to find that stuff, but what I still don’t get is why. What would you think? Is it just the final flip-off? Or more ‘sorry I ruined your life, take this stuff an’ we’re done’? I just - why not leave a gods damn note?”

“I oughtta just sell the damn thing, like I did the rest. Worth a mint, I reckon. Ah, I don’t know why, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Sometimes I take it out and just look at it a spell. Probably ain’t healthy. Shouldn’t dwell on the past. I got it good now, don’t I? Better than lots of folk, anyhow. Got four rooms to call my own, and a job doin’ something I love what don’t get me shot at. I should be lookin’ forward, not back. But the nights get me funny sometimes, you feel?”

“I guess that’s about all there is t’ tell; you know all the rest. Is it better or worse than you thought? Heh. Well, whichever. Promise me this - if’n you ever do make one of your movin’ pictures out of it, I get to make the costumes… and you pick someone pretty to play me!”

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this some time ago, as part of Hettie's background. SHe has not reunited with Nycki, believe it or not!


End file.
